Organizational Readiness for Co-Creation of Public Services in the Central and Eastern European Administrative Tradition: Development of the Conceptual Multi-Attribute Decision Support Model

Co-creation of public services and policies is considered a promising practice of re-shaping the traditional relationship between the state and its citizens, businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Nevertheless, there are also warnings that the implementation of the process of co-creation could fail. A possible reason is that the organization is not ready or sufficiently mature to implement the process of co-creation. This paper addresses co-creation drivers and barriers identified through systematic literature review and analysis of case studies from two Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The aim of this paper is to provide practitioners from CEE countries with a conceptual multi-attribute decision support model for evaluating the organizational readiness for co-creation. The methodological framework consists of three steps. The first two steps, content analysis (i.e. literature review) and case-study analysis, were used to identify and analyze drivers and barriers, which are then used in the last step to develop the conceptual multi-attribute decision support model. The developed model consists of 26 attributes grouped into three categories: capacity of the organization, drivers and barriers related to internal (public organization) co-creators, and context related drivers and barriers.

The key points for practitioners are:

• Co-creation drivers and barriers affect organizations at the beginning of their co-creation journey (i.e. in identifying the key co-creation success factor at the organizational level);

• Co-creation drivers and barriers serve as guidance to organizations that were unsuccessful in co-creation;

• The conceptual model supporting the evaluation of co-creation readiness serves as a tool to those that consider implementing co-creation;

• The model offers an insight into a possible methodology for evaluation of readiness in different areas;

• For practitioners from the CEE region, co-creation drivers and barriers, together with the conceptual multi-attribute decision support model supporting the evaluation of co-creation readiness, offer a roadmap to successful co-creation.